JF Ptak Science Books

The Birth of the "Internet" at the End of WWII: Vannevar Bush & the MEMEX, July 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 190


In the midst of running the American scientific war effort (As Director of the Office of Scientific Research in charge of some 6000 scientists) and in the middle of trying to figure out the best way of dealing with the coming proliferation of atomic weapons, Vannevar Bush somehow found the time to write what many consider to be the first scientific paper on what would become the internet. The paper,   "As We May Think";  was published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945.

(It might be odd to look at it this way, but if you were a Nazi time traveler able to assassinate three people in the U.S. that would change the direction of the American effort in WWII, one would certainly be Roosevelt (who rose to the tasks of the Depression and the War  with Lincolnian sustainability), and I'm not unconvinced that one f the other two might very well be Bush--he kept the scientific agenda on course, direct, and to the point, saving time, effort and lives.  Its an interesting bit to think about....)

Bush was doing A LOT of thinking on the organization of thought in that year.  I suspect that in trying to deal with the problems of the coming atomic arms race (beginning in the year before Trinity) and in trying to figure out how to distribute the knowledge-base that lead to the building of the bomb, that the idea of the MEMEX may very well have been the future consequence formed by his immediate concerns.

The MEMEX (Mechanical Aid to Memory) was Bush's breathtaking idea for a design for the organization of associative thought and memory.  It was a mechanical “aid” to memory, building “trails” of associations of ideas.  The MEMEX was another in the long line of art-of-memory attempts, from the ancients to the memory palaces and theaters of Raymond Lull and Francis Bacon and Athanasius Kircher and Giulio Camillo. What made this so appealing to the next generation of thinker on the distribution of information in the computer age was its ideas on making massive amounts of information obtainable; it was more about *thinking* about order and ability and access to information (in quantities unthinkable and by means unknowable) in 1945. 

Looking at the future square in the face, Bush writes (on page eight of his short paper) with extraordinary perception: 

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

"The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."

Sounds pretty familiar, yes? 

Some of the great internet developers who have recognized the importance of this paper by Bush include Doug Englebart, (who would write to Bush acknowledging the influence Bush's article had had on his own work. (Zachary, 267).);  J.C.R. Liklider  (Waldrop, 2000): and Ted Nelson (Internet pioneer and coiner of the term hypertext and know as "one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age." (Edwards, 1997)).  And of course many, many others. 

The full text of the paper "As We May Think" is below.

On the Atomic Bomb: 16 July-9 August, 1945

I've made a number of posts recently relating to the building of and the decision to use the atomic bomb, from the Trinity Test to the Nagasaki bomb, 16 July-9 August, as we are in that time of year when all of this happened, 63 years ago.  To look at all of these post, click here.  Beginning on 6th August I will begin posting a series of 38 documents  (written in 1945 and early 1946) from the Vannevar Bush group tasked with the problem of  the coming proliferation of atomic weapons.  As far as I can determine NONE of these documents have ever been published. The first of these papers to be presented is by William Shockley (nobelist and highly problematic late-life thinker) on the Economics of the Atomic Bomb (1945).

Atomic Bomb, 1 August 1945: Stimson on the Publication of the Smyth Report

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 188

Secretary of War Henry Stimson's Diary Entry for 1 August 1945, centering on the publication of Henry DeWolf Smyth's history of the Manhattan Project (bold is by me as are any statements made between [ ] ):

August 1, 1945
"As soon as I arrived at the Department I called in General Marshall and asked him whether he had received my message through McCarthy and he told me that he had and that the speech had been changed and made in an entirely different form."

"I then took up with Harrison, Bundy and Groves the third paper to be issued in S-1, namely that of the scientists.  The draft of this paper [Henry DeWolf Smyth’s A general account of the development of methods of using atomic energy for military purposes, which would be known later in the year as  Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 1945, and then more generally and unofficially as the Smyth Report]  is about two hundred pages long - manifestly so big that I cannot possibly read it now, and I therefore went over the skeleton of it and the pros and cons of making any speech (as to which I am very doubtful) with my three consultants. The aim of the paper is to backfire reckless statements by independent scientists after the demonstration of the bomb. If we could be sure that these could be controlled and avoided, all of us would much prefer not to issue such a paper. But under the circumstances of the entire independence of action of scientists and the certainty that there would be a tremendous amount of excitement and reckless statement, Groves, who is a very conservative man, had reached the conclusion that the lesser evil would be for us to make a statement carefully prepared so as not to give away anything vital and thus try to take the stage away from the others. We debated long over the situation for it is a very difficult question and all of us recognize its difficulty. Rules have been drawn under which this present paper has been formulated. I went over those rules and then postponed the matter until tomorrow when I shall have a talk with Conant, Groves, Bundy, and some of Groves' assistants on the whole matter. I am of course much influenced by the fact that Groves has reached a decision in favor of the statement."

(General Groves I believe recognized the expediency of the report as well in spite of his expectedly ferocious adherence to security protocol—the report, while revealing a lot of data, would also establish the limit of publication of information on the Project and on the bomb.  Overall, it was a smart thing to do, establishing the control of the dialog on the subject of the bomb. It was after all Groves (in 1944) who appointed Smyth to the Richard C. Tolman Committee to make recommendations for the post-war development of atomic energy; Smyth recommended publishing a report on the making of the bomb that would be published soon after it was no longer a secret; Groves concurred.  The report was officially released (in 160,000 copies) on 12 August 1945.)

S-1 Executive Committee, Manhattan Project,
September 14, 1942
l. to r.: Thomas Crenshaw, Robert Oppenheimer, Harold C. Urey, Ernest O. Lawrence, James B. Conant, Lyman J. Briggs, E. V. Murphree, Arthur Compton,  Robert Thornton,  K. D. Nichols.

Picture at top is of Smyth with what looks like the advance copy (the famous "lithoprint" edition).

Following are the opening paragraphs of the Smyth report from the Preface and Introduction: 

Preface

"The ultimate responsibility for our nation's policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. The average citizen cannot be expected to understand clearly how an atomic bomb is constructed or how it works but there is in this country a substantial group of engineers and scientists who can understand such things and who can explain their potentialities of atomic bombs to their fellow citizens. The present report is written for this professional group and is a matter-of-fact, general account of work in the USA since 1939 aimed at the production of such bombs. It is neither a documented official history nor a technical treatise for experts. Secrecy requirements have affected both the detailed content and general emphasis so that many interesting developments have been omitted..."

First Paragraph of the Introduction:

"1.1. The purpose of this report is to describe the scientific and technical developments in this country since 1940 directed toward the military use of energy from atomic nuclei. Although not written as a "popular" account of the subject, this report is intended to be intelligible to scientists and engineers generally and to other college graduates with a good grounding in physics and chemistry. The equivalence of mass and energy is chosen as the guiding principle in the presentation of the background material of the "Introduction.""

The full text of the report is located HERE.

 

The Atomic Bomb: the Only Order to Actually Use Nuclear Weapons, 25 July 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC 

Here are the two basic documents which prepared the actual use of atomic weapons against Japanese targets (written 22 July and 25 July, respectively).    The first was prepared by Colonel John Stone for his superior General of the Army Air Forces Henry H. Hap Arnold, initiated by General George Marshall through General Thomas Handy—updating Arnold on the progress at the Potsdam Conference from which he (Stone)  had just returned.  The next is the only actual signed-off document authorizing the use of nuclear weapons, and comes under the direction of George Marshall’s directive to General Handy:  basically relating that the P{resident had authorized Secretary Stimson who had authorized Marshall to authorize Handy to authorize General Carl Spaatz (Commanding General, U.S. Army Strategic Air Force) to use the weapon. Spaatz is also directed to deliver a copy of the order (“personally”, that is, by hand)  to General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz.
Source: The National Security Archive

The Atomic Bomb: 6 August 1945. Propaganda Leaflet Dropped on Japanese Cities

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These are translations of leaflets that were dropped on Japanese cities in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima (as Nagasaki, which would be bombed three days later on 9 August is not mentioned). Both of these are again from the Harry Truman Presidential Library.  The Japanese did not submit to the demand of unconditional surrender as laid out in Potsdam on 26 July, not did they submit when the Soviet Union declare war, nor did they submit after the 9 August bombing of Nagasaki.  They did finally accept the conditions of unconditional surrender surrender on 15 August, signing away the war two weeks later on the USS Missouri, 2 September 1945.  A third atomic bomb was nearly ready for use by the middle of August.   

The Atomic Bomb, 31 July 1945: Truman's Statement on the Bombing of Hiroshima

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I've made several posts on the development of the first atomic bomb(s) as we approach the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945).  At this point in 1945, the Potsdam Declaration had been announced demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan, Little Boy was being assembled, and Fat Man had arrived at Tinian Island.  The last bits of the Manhattan Project were being put into place.  One of public relations parts—the first PR involving the use of the bomb--is a document that I’ve never seen before, found at the Truman Presidential Library (and available digitally). 
Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, sent this message to President Truman as the statement to be released by the White House once the (secret) bomb had been dropped (also known as “Use Day”)—an explanation to the American people about what would happen on 6 August.

The Transformation of Animals into Man--Peter Camper's Bad Idea of 1778

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Peter Camper (1722-1789) was educated by some of the most gifted minds of the mid-18th century (and standard, daily-occurrence names in the history of science) including  Willem Jacob 's Gravesande (1688-1742) and Herman Boerhaave.  Camper made very substantial contributions during a long and varied career (as an anatomist, anthropologist, naturalist, paleontologist) one of which., perhaps, was the originated of the idea and practice of the study of comparative anatomy.  He was very highly gifted, talented, capable, insightful; he was an excellent observer, and was also an able and capable researcher.   

Unfortunately there were some stumbles along the way, or at least which look to me like stumbles; some minor, some great. 
The relatively minor one is exhibited here, to the left--to me, this seems like a "what in the name of sweet holy Neptune is going on here?' category member.   It occurs in his  On the Points of Similarity between the Human Species, Quadrupeds, Birds, and Fish; with Rules for Drawing, founded on this Similarity (1778), and in general is an attempt at localizing, generalizing the study of anatomy, making it understandable in what seems to be multi-dimensional ways—or at least in ways that I cannot frankly understand.  In this image he tries to show the similarities in the bodies of the horse and wo/man, transforming the horse into a woman by virtue of a tremendous range of allowances:  dropping the hip of the horse, straightening the horse’s back, standing it upright, shortening and straightening the legs, shallowing the chest, losing the tail, straightening and shortening the neck, and so on and on…until, voila, a woman is made, showing the basic samenesses in all mammals.  I think that you could also work this magic with a (green, four door) 1960 Rambler—perhaps not, and perhaps this is no doubt a cheap shot, but the engraving, the image, is just so incredible I really don’t know what to do with it. 

His greater, post-creation stumble is one that he is probably best known for today—the facial angle.  Ever more so than the transformation angles, the facial angle found its way into repugnant uses in the “scientific" racialist circles—it was a study of the so-called progress of nature exemplified in the visual rise of the slope in the profile of man and beast, the slope of the profile from the top of the lip to the forehead.  It was a geometry of dominance employed by the dominant race against those who were different—the more “backward” the angle between the lip and forehead leaned, the closer to the baser breads and the animals one was.  As a matter of fact Camper uses a progression of eight profiles to delineate changes between simian and the “ideal” man (?), the assertion being that the greater the angle of regression the greater the closeness was to the monkey.  In Johann Caspar Lavater, perhaps the best known of the physiognomists, would publish a 24-profile version of Camper’s idea, showing the progression from frog to Apollo (?!).  Scientific fallacies such as these would be investigated and employed with increasing venom over the 15 decades—they are largely gone now as junk science, but they still exist as mis-remembered proof in some racial thought.  It would seem as though Camper's work in this theory of types (yes he was an influence on Goethe) gave much of this thought scientific credence. 

Blank People, Moonmen, and the John Herschel Hoax of 1835

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In what seems to be a continuing post on the idea of blank people (I’ve posted on them twice before, here and here), that is to say, images of people with almost no attributes, people waiting to be “drawn in” or “filled up”, or completed in some way.  The image that I saved today is from William Hogarth,  whose witty attempt in displaying the hoaxing reports of life on the Moon depicts empty Moonpeople, "revealed during an eclipse, thanks to a powerful telescope, and faithfully reproduced afterwards".  Machines and instruments during this time seemed to have improved much quicker than the fictional and fantastical thinking that may have used them--even so Umberto Eco, who I think misses this point, wrote that, in this particular case, the telescope "had not pout an end to fantasy....but it has often deprived it of discernment and moral commitment, reducing it to an ingenious and neurotic form of futuristic anticipation".  (This is From Eco's first book, printed in 1963 (!), The Picture History of Invention, written with G.B. Zorzoli.  In spite of its tragic title, the writing and appreciation of invention is very good.) 

In a great prank/hoax of the 19th century, it was reported in 1835 that Sir John Herschel (son of a hugely important astronomer, Sir William, and who was of great importance in his own removed right) found some sort of living, humanoid-like beings alive, and seemingly thriving, on the Moon.  He did this with a 24-foot (diameter!!) telescope that “cost three hundred thousand dollars”, an amount funded by the King.  The whole thing was moved to the observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, where the discoveries were made.  Sir John was of course quite surprised to hear of his discoveries, though I'm sure he would’ve been happy to get his hands on the telescope, which would’ve been the largest in the world, by far, in 1835.  John's father, the extraordinary Sir William Herschel, owned one of the world's largest in the 18th century.  It was 48" in diameter, and a monster for its time.  As a matter of fact in the first month or so of the announcement of the invention of photography John built his own camera and made a daguerreotype of his father's instrument.  In one of the few true bits of the story, John Herschel's telescope was famously located at the Cape of Good Hope (John having moved his family and his 20' scope their in 1833). 

The imaginary telescope wouldn’t  be the largest in the world, now, though—the Keck instruments in Hawaii (at 10 meters) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (10.4 meters in the Canaries) would dwarf the unimaginably huge fictional creation of 1835.  The extraordinary price, too-an unreachable amount, actually, in 1835—would’ve been about a huge amount today as well:  the adjusted for CPI figure for $3000,000 1835 dollars would be around $7 billion 2008 dollars.  A lot, of course, but not an order of magnitude more, I think, than the cost of these things, and certainly not an impossible-to-imagine amount as the Sir John fictional scope. (It seems to me that the Anglo-Australian telescope named for John Herschel  with first light in 1987 cost 25 millions dollars.)

On a different route altogether is the Mirror Man, who in some aspects is a blank person because he mirrors everything that is placed before him, a parable-like tabula rasa, writ on again and again.  (The legend reads “Habit de Marchland Miroitier Lunettier” by Nicolas de Larmessin III (1640-1725).  (This image was surfaced in Barbara Stafford and Frances Terpak’s Devices of Wonder, from the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, The Getty, 2002, page 258.)   The history of the mirror is really pretty interesting, and even by the time that this engraving was made the mirror was still an uncommon object--more so in the hands of the common folk.  (I wonder when it was that the majority of the working classes in the United States were able to have a good, long look at themselves in their own mirror at home?  When did most people in the U.S. have the luxury of being able to see themselves, in private, whenever they wanted too?  Like, when could they look at their own teeth in private?  Or see themselves naked?  My guess is that it is between 1800-1850.)

Crazy-Insane Eyes Selling Mercedes, 1924. Bad Ideas #22

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I must say that when I first saw this advertisement for Mercedes (1924?, in the Illustrirte Zeitung from Leipzig) that I couldn't really remember seeing someone looking this crazy trying to sell something, to anyone. This is particularly so when you take a look at a similar design for Continental Tyres, except that this ad appeared 14 years or so earlier, in 1910 (and in The Illustrated London News for May 14):

Then I wondered about insane/laser eyes in general, and couldn't come up much there, either.  Barney Google certainly had "goo goo googly eyes" but they weren't necessarily crazy/insane.

Superman on the other hand did have laser eyes, and sometimes he was (made to be) crazy--still not quite up to the Mercedes guy, and he wasn't trying to sell anything but himself and the comic that he was in.   I think that the Mercedes Man might be in his own category, and I'm not so sure how successful this ad campaign could've been, especially in the Weimar/Schacht era in hyper-inflated Germany.  

The Geometry of American Western Expansion: Lines in the Sand, Lines in the Air

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The story of the West getting filled up in the 1870s and 1880's is a story of lines—railroad track, telegraph wires, barbed wire fences, and words on a page; big changes from disparate but related areas in technology and legislation, but when you looked at them from a distance and in the proper perspective, they all looked exactly  the same.

The greatest of these was probably the invention of barbed wire in 1873, with Joseph Glidden, Jacob Haish and Isaac Elwood all managing to independently come upon the idea at about the same time.  What barbed wire brought to the West was control and settlement.  Prior to barbed wire there was open range grazing of cattle and extensive cattle drives, mainly because there was no fencing. There were also few farms due to this sort of grazing—the only thing a farm was here was in the way, and there was no recourse for the farmer to protect his lands from a grazing herd.  There was no fencing because there were no materials for the fence.  Fencing was made almost entirely with lumber and stone, and on the treeless plains and the vast non-New England tracts of land, it was simply an impossible task.  The introduction of barbed wire changed all of this very quickly, with thousands of miles of new fencing strung in the 1870’s alone.  Fencing meant control, restriction of the use of land, of access to water, and to a way of life.  It also meant that the farmer was now free to make a claim at a way of life on the plains, beginning a torrent of settlement and farms.

Settlement was enormously aided in this period by three major acts of legislation over a sixteen year period, the first of which was the Homestead Act of 1862. This was a revolutionary concept, legislated in 1358 words, effectively turning over 270 million acres, or about 8 percent of the country, of public lands to private citizens (“actual settlers of the public domain”).  A claim could be made for a farm of 160 acres, for free, provided a structure was built on the land and it was maintained for five years.  One could buy the parcel outright for $1.25 an acre as well.   The Desert Land Act of 1877 opened drier lands, selling 640 acres at $1.25 an acre with three years to pay, so long as the land was irrigated by the end of the three years.  Land that was deemed "unfit for farming" was sold to those who might want to "timber and stone" (logging and mining) upon the land with the Timber and Land Act of 1878. The act was used by speculators who were able to get great expanses declared "unfit for farming" allowing them to increase their land holdings at minimal expense.  The Homestead Act alone accounted for the creation of almost 400,000 farms in the West by 1890.

Settlement was dramatically increased by the promise of mineral wealth—not necessarily just by the introduction of miners, but by securing the lands from and removing its Indian owners.  The Custer expedition into the Black Hills in 1873, for example, reported some hope for finding gold in the sacred mountains of the Sioux. Thousands of miners responded to possibility of wealth, and Custer was again dispatched to secure safety for them in the restricted lands.  This in turn lead to more settlers and coincidentally to the debacle of the Little Big Horn, which was the beginning of the end of the Siouian control over vast amounts of land.  From prospectors to protection to conflict, ultimately making land more available for more people. 

The spread of the railroads was also an enormous settlement factor, with the number of miles of track being laid in Texas and the Great Plains doubling in just 5 years.  Not only could you get West more easily, and quickly, and with less pain and suffering, but you could also be much more easily re-supplied.  Telegraph wires tripled, making it easier to control events:  and this means from being able to respond to Indian attacks more quickly to ordering boxes of nails, or beer, or shipments of newly-invented canned food. 

The Advancing Frontier and the Increase in Bloody Names of Literary Heroes

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The names of the American Western hero in the first half of the 19th century were, largely, more common, even a little reserved, underlying their more careful, thoughtful nature:  David, Leatherstocking, Natty, Jack, Hicks, Kit, and even Nate (later “Bloody Nate” ), all from come, famously, from the 1830’s-1860’s.  They were replaced in the late 1860’s through the end of the century with folks whose names told much more of their story without the reader having to open the book:  Deadshot Dave, Deadwood Dick, Daring Dick the Apache Killer,  Roaring Ralph Rockwood the Reckless Ranger, Calamity Jane, Edna the Girl Brigand and Hurricane Nell all appeared in the endless pages of the Dime-Novel, cranked out at furious rates for 40 years, changing the literary landscape of the West forever.  The House of Beadle and Adams were that major force that produced this new variety of Western Hero, stripping away, for the most part, the philosophical reticence and even careful adventure of the earlier prototypes, leaving mostly bloody escapism and thrills.  I wonder if this had anything to do with the familiarity of the event, or the ending of the Civil War, or the

ending of the last Native American resistance, or the more common nature of the westward expansion history, or even the possible thirst for more adventure once the frontier had been declared official closed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1892. 

A Very Short Look at American Western Literature:

1833.  David Crockett, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett.  There were several books about Crockett’s adventures published in the early 1830’s; after his death at the Alamo in 1836 Crockett was lionized, and became the stuff of truth, lore and legend for 150 years.

1837.  Nathan Slaughter, “Bloody Nate”, the hero of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods, a hugely popular work enjoyed a large print run encompassing at least 24 American editions. 

1841.  First appearance of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo in The Deerslayer. 

1848+  Charles Webber, Texas ranger and passed minister, wrote (with difficulty) a number of westerns praised as authentic, including Jack Long, or a Shot in the Eye (1846) and Old Hicks the Guide (1848).

1850’s.  Emerson Bennett, League of the Miamis, and The Prairie Flower

1850’s. Capt Mayne Reid busily wrote 90 books, including 12 Westerns from The Scalp Hunter (1851) to the Free Lances (1884) with 10 more Westerns in between. 

1850’s. Kit Caron, real-life soldier and adventurer and mass murderer whose exploits were explored and exploded by Dr. DeWitt Peters (for one) in such works as The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, Nestor of the Rocky Mountains (1858). (Yes Carson was important and yes he did great stuff with Kearny and Stinky Fremont, but it all gets covered over liked boiled glue with his so-called "campaign" against the Navajo Indians and their forced death march to Bosque Redondo.  I think he died a miserable, stupid death with a Sam Houston hole in his belly on the floor of an army barracks.  Good riddance.)

1870.  Bret Harte’s Luck of the Roaring Camp.

1871.  Mark Twain Roughing It.

1885.  T. Roosevelt Hunting Trips of a Ranchman  TR was among the earliest of cowboys and among the top percentage of teh top percent of the most privileged cowboys.  Still in all he was a good writer, and one can't fault him for having money. 

1887.  Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys; or, Raiders and Rangers.  Ingraham may well have written over 600 novels (including200 Buffalo Bill stories) under his own name and under the pseudonyms of Dr. Noel Dunbar, Dangerfield Burr, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Colonel Leon Lafitte, Frank Powell, Harry Dennies Perry, Midshipman Tom W. Hall, and Lieut. Preston Graham.  This was a busy man.

1897.  Alfred Henry Lewis The Old Cattleman

1907. O’Henry Heart of the West

The Mother of all Renaisance Logical Graphs, The Knight's Tour, Porphyry and Boethius

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 179
Following up on a post from 21 July about an early graph showing difference over time (state populations, 1790-1860, US Census), I’m thinking that the claim may still be basically true in it most restricted sense. Doing some more thinking on how information has been represented and the history of graphs in general, I think that this is still the case even though there may be some close associates that reach back hundreds of years into the past.

Something that seems similar but really isn’t is this advanced, morphed, untranquilized version of the square of opposition. A general, basic square of opposition begins with the four Aristotelian propositions: universal affirmative (symbolized as A,  “Omne S est P”.  or “Every S is P All S is P”;  universal negative (symbolized as E, “Nullum S est P” or  “No S is P All S is not P”; particular affirmative (symbolized as  I,  “Quoddam S est P” or Some S is P Some S is Pl and  particular negative (symbolized as O, “Quoddam S non est P” or Some S is not P Some S is not P.  The parent graph of this inherently perplexing and beautiful logical relations table is below, taken from the Murray State site (and if you follow the link you'll have a concise and clear explanation of how this works):

The square of opposition does in a way resemble another interesting graph-like description of an old-school (ancient) mathematical problem:  the Knight's Tour.  This is a problem setting forward a chess piece knight on a trip across the chessboard (8x8 square) during which he must touch every square and touch every square but once.  (Here's a way-above interesting [read "obsessive" and lovely] site that gets the issue across  in a big, mathematical, artistic manner.)
One solution for the Knight's Tour as follows (from here)...yes, I know it has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but it does bear a resemblance to the logical decision maps, which I think is uncommon.       

For a wonderful summation of the visualization of data and bearing heavily upon the Renaissance see James Franklin’s Diagrammatic reasoning and modelling in the imagination:the secret weapons of the Scientific Revolution and his website.
 

Wandering off the path a little more leads us to the decision scheme known as Porphyrys Tree, a hierarchial organizer based upon the then Aristotlean categories (substance, quantity, relation, quality, doing, undergoing, place where, time when, position and having).  These would really form the roots of the Porphyryn Tree, and which, “if they were worked out fully, would contain all the species of the things what are in the world” (from Eleonore Stump Boethius, Cornell; Boethius was the “Last of the Romans”, killed in ca. 526, but whose writings and influence lived on to make him perhaps the greatest tutor of the Middle Ages).

False Vertical Comets, Interior-Earth Asteroids, and Shoemaker-Levy as a Military "Bomb". Bad Ideas, part 21.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 178

My friend Marty Weil, the Ephemera Emperor and connoisseur of liminal sublimities at ephemera.typepad.com wrote a way-too-nice post about the BAD IDEAS section of this blog.  There's thankfully not enough time to deal with the bad idea magma broiling away beneath our feet, but I do like to occasionally pick out some of the pretty ones and surface them from what is generally a deeply deserved dark place in the history of ideas.  And what came up this afternoon--and in honor of Marty's effort on my behalf-- was this little wonder (left): the title of this interesting, odd beauty is “Formation d’une Fausse Comete Verticale”, and it looks as though it was published in the 1872 or so, and engraved in Grenoble by Ph. Breton (for “aut” or the author of the paper, Maisonville (?)).     The nature of this illustration has flipped around quite a bit—the initial translation of the title sends it to the heights of uncompromising weirdness, “On the Formation of a False Vertical Comet”, except that the “false comet” part was really, I think, referring to an asteroid more so than, well, I don’t know.  (This “I don’t know” part can get very weird, as we’ll see below.)   So the title kind of gets back into line with the world of the possible (except for the “vertical” part); but from my reading, the content of the illustrations takes it back out, again.  The round object in the middle is the earth; and the curved parabolics leading towards it, and inside it (deep inside it), leaves me only with wonder, and without explanation.  It is entirely possible that I’m just not up to the task of interpreting this image, but the inner-earth cross-hatchwork of asteroids leaves me baffled, as does the "axe de l'essaim" ("stacked axis??), and the trailing atmosphere, and so on.  I really can’t find any key to this image. 

Getting back to the unforeseeable weirdness that “explain things”, I found the following statement from a website explaining the “true” nature of the Shoemaker-Levy comet—the writer claims that it wasn’t a comet, not a comet at all, but rather a false comet (“une fausse comete” redux), and actually a series of “bombs” built by the U.S. Army and delivered to the surface of Jupiter by NASA disguised “as cometary collisions”.  (“En 1997 parait sur le forum fr.sci.astronomie un étrange document anonyme. Ce texte soutient que l'étrange série d'objets appelé "Comète Schoemaker-Lévy 9" ou SL9, qui a frappé la planète Jupiter en juillet 1994 en provoquant des explosions colossales était en fait une expérimentation de bombes d'antimatières misent au point par l'armée américaine, lancées par les navettes spatiales de la NASA et déguisées en collisions cométaires.”)  I must say that this explanation stumped me—sounds like a long, long way to go over a long period of for an experiment to blow up gas on Jupiter, if you ask me...

Henri Poincare, Relativity and the full text of "The Principles of Mathematical Physics" (1905)

JF Ptak  Science Books LLC   Post 177

I really don’t want to make a post here on the pre-history of the special theory of relativity (SR)—I really just want to post the English translation of a paper that came late in the career of the polymathic Henri Poincare (1854-1911) and in the same year as Einstein’s epochal paper (1905). (Poincare would republish this paper in a more technical form in 1906 as  "Sur la dynamique de l’electron", published in the Comptes Rendus volume 140, 1905 Lecat Bibliographie de la Relativite # 2269, and which can be found in a fine translation here by an old friend of our store, Scott Walter).    (This photo shows Poincare seated next to Mme Curie at the first Solvay Conference in 1911.)   

It has been resident here on the computer for a long time and thought to publish it here.  This is not by any means the only effort by Poincare in this area—in addition to technical papers Poincare had earlier published his "Science and Hypothesis" in 1902 which included some basic philosophical investigations on the relativity of space and time, the questioning of the existence of the aerther, and some other pertinent SR-related topics—again, addressed to an advanced general audience. 
There were of course many others who made important contributions to to development of SR:  Joseph LArmor, Wilhelm Wien, Heinrich Hertz, HA Lorentz, W. Voigt, Michelson Morely, Walter Kaufman, Max Abraham, GF FitzGerlad, Herman Minkowski, and many others.  (A nice place to start on the history of this topic is  The Genesis of General Relativity Vol. 3: Theories of Gravitation in the Twilight of Classical Physics; Part I (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 250), 253-271, Springer, 2007.

Although a strong case can be made for Poincare being one of the last of a breed that “knew everything”(like Arnold Sommerfeld, Herman von Helmholtz, JC Maxwell, Goethe, and so on) he really didn’t get to SR before Einstein, in my opinion.  At the very least it was Einstein who correctly reinterpreted Lorentzian electrodynamics and finally did away with the ether, not Poincare.

Also see a fine physics blog dealing with Poincare here.

And so the paper:

THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS.
by Henri Poincare

Reprinted from The Monist, volume 15, Number 1, 1905.

WHAT is the actual state of mathematical physics? What are the problems it is led to set itself? What is its future? Is its orientation on the point of modifying itself ? Will the aim and the methods of this science appear in ten years to our immediate successors in the same light as to ourselves; or, on the contrary, are we about to witness a profound transformation? Such are the questions we are forced to raise in entering today upon our investigation.

If it is easy to propound them, to answer is difficult.

If we feel ourselves tempted to risk a prognostication, we have, to resist this temptation, only to think of all the stupidities the most eminent savants of a hundred years ago would have uttered, if one had asked them what the science of the nineteenth century would be. They would have believed themselves bold in their predictions, and after the event, how very timid we should have found them. Do not, therefore, expect of me any prophecy; if I had known what one will discover tomorrow, I would long ago have published it to secure me the priority. But if, like all prudent physicians, I shun giving a prognosis, nevertheless I cannot dispense with a little diagnostic; well, yes, there are indications of a serious crisis, as if we should expect an approaching transformation.

We are assured that the patient will not die of it, and even can hope that this crisis will be salutary, that it was even necessary for his development. This the history of the past seems to guarantee us.

This crisis in fact is not the first, and for its comprehension is important to recall those which have preceded it.

Mathematical physics, we know, was born of celestial mechanics, which engendered it at the end of the eighteenth century at the moment when it itself attained its complete development. During its first years especially, the infant resembled in a striking way its mother.

Census Art and the Display of Quantitative Data, 1860

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC Post 176

                                                          This data set is from the Johnson's Family Atlas for 1863 in the "Historical And Statistical View of the United States" section, printed on the back of the Tennessee and Kentucky map, and which was derived from the Eight Census of the United States  (1860).  It displays the changes in the states' populations relative to each other, placing them in a populace order (highest to lowest), for a seventy year period, from 1790 to 1860, following the changes in the 17 states of 1790 to the 34 states in 1860.     So far as I can determine this is a very early graphical display revealing these sorts of comparisons of, well, anything.  It is  a little tenuous and twisted, but the ride it offers is determined and it is revealing--it just doesn't enter the form in which the data could be more usefully (and quickly) displayed.  If you set your mind to it you can follow the languid changes in increases and decreases in a state's population relative to the other states in the Union--for example, it is easy to follow the fortunes of New York and Virginia, as the changes each experiences over these seventy years is relatively marginal. Drastic changes are another story, and following the lines of their evolutions not easy:  the mercurial climbing chnanes in Ohio and Illinois are a bit hard to figure, though the longish but large changes (like that of South Carolina) prove a bit less tenacious to see.      

There would be many more of these displays to come--particularly in the very large, double-page, fabulously colored lithograph that appeared in the atlas folio of the famous 11th census--but this was one of the very earliest attempts to display changes over time, and it worked out beautifully.